In cases like this, e-marketing has to be stepped up. It is said that 80% of sales don't come from sales or marketing outbound initiatives but come from prospects finding you.

So, as in the old days of direct mail, it is important to establish a dialogue with customers so that your value is understood and the move towards the sale is more likely. Content, contectualised content, is therefore of paramount importance.

Here are 10 tips for maximising your internet marketing message:

1: Review your database of existing customers. Work out how the database segments so you can classify your marketing initiatives.

2: Talking with these customers, understand what they do and how they use your product to achieve that. This will be a time consuming process and relies on the fundamental support of senior management (who may be inclined to view short term targets for the marketing team as of more importance than contextualised content).

3: Write case studies showing how your solution has worked for these clients. Given that you will be introducing these case studies to new prospects, structure the case studies so that they can be delivered in chunks acording to where your prospect is in the sales cycle. Don't forget all the people in the buying process - you need to be reflect their needs too.

4: Ensure that your case study structure is built into your website to enable your sales people to use it, your customers to find it, and your blogs etc to link to it.

5: Talk with your sales people about the typical sales cycle for the different kinds of customers you are approaching. Define your case study approach on a segment by segment basis (e.g. large corporations may take months to decide; smaller companies may take less time). Develop a communication model for each customer category.

6: Develop a social presence on the web (blogs; twitter; contributions to forums etc) so that people come across you and begin to trust you. Keep your presence/message consistent to increase credibility. Again, it is crucial to gain management support for such initiatives and not allow them to be wasted. For example, try to avoid the temptation simply to use blogs/twitter etc as a way of selling products. In any case, such techniques are frowned upon in communities.

7: Understand your value to the position of the customer. Develop stories/articles which add value to the prospect so that trust is built and value understood. On the web, the story is findability and consistency of thought. Remember the golden rule: if value is demonstrable then price becomes irrelevant. Value definition is therefore crucial to the successful complex product sale.

8: The rules defined by <a href="http://www.sv-institut.de/english.php">Siegfried Vogele </a>in his dialogue method are as relevant to the web as they were to direct mail. With your case studies, web pages etc, key value is demonstrated by headlines first, then images, then captions, then paragraphs.

You know from earlier stages what you want to say, now you must structure the information so you can say it so it sinks in. In email communications, for example, keep the most important part of the message at the top (so people can read it in their in-box); use bullet points (but keep them relevant and focused on value); limit the number of calls to action etc to avoid going for sales overkill...

9: Much of the communication strategy described above relates to customer interaction through search. Yet outbound is equally important because even with low conversion rates the message needs to get out to encourage discussion, debate, and of course lead generations and sales.

Therefore, never forget when conducting outbound marketing activity that the prospects you use are sales ready. Remembering what we said earlier about 80% of customers finding you, it is very important that the effort you make on the remaining 20% is targeted to those you know will be most receptive.

10: Finally, if in difficulty with developing communications, use this handy fall-back to help you structure what you want to say: What problems is the customer encountering?; why should they choose you?; why should they believe you?; can you define a measureable financial benefit that the customer can expect from using you (ask your sales team to help you)?

This is a simple guide and is by no means comprehensive. But I hope some of it is of use.

Sincerely,

Mike Smith
Red Page Marketing
Blog: A Brand Day Out